-Caveat Lector- >From wsws.org WSWS : History Interview with David King at the opening of his exhibition The Commissar Vanishes "There was no political continuity between Lenin and Stalin. Stalin and his regime destroyed the revolution." By Stefan Steinberg 29 December 1998 First of all, I asked David King about the background to the exhibition. You must understand there is not a lot of money around for staging such an exhibition. It has taken some time to get off the ground. This is the third venue. The first was in Vienna, the second in Milan. And the thing is sort of gathering momentum The exhibition here in Berlin looks good and on the whole I am very pleased with it. What is good about the exhibition is that it is a chance to see original material as well as reproductions from prints. Everything for example in the vitrine cabinets are originals and you have a real chance to see where the material came from, whether it's from newspapers, magazines or documents. The exhibition is spread over the whole house, in all 10 rooms, and up until now there has been a lot of media interest. What sort of reactions has the exhibition provoked? Well, there have been hardly any hostile reactions. Nobody can argue with the material I have collected. On the basis of what is exhibited here nobody can defend Stalin or Stalinism. There was, however, an amusing experience in Milan. Four visitors to the exhibition approached me there and complimented me on having done the retouching. [ laughs] They thought it was some sort of art show--I find that very funny. But interestingly enough you sometimes get a similar reaction in Moscow as well because some of the pictures are so imprinted on people's minds, for example--the picture of Lenin and Gorky together. There is this very strange, very long, narrow print featuring Lenin and Gorky together, which everybody has seen and knows--but no negative is such a shape. In fact, the picture has been cut and retouched from a group photo taken of delegates to the Second World Congress of the Communist International. When they see the whole original print featuring 25 people, then in Moscow I get quizzical looks; they are asking themselves--"Can this be the case?" How and when did you begin your work? I first started collecting material in 1970. I went to Russia and asked for material about Trotsky and there wasn't any. I was asked why I was interested in Trotsky. Stalin was important for the revolution, not Trotsky, they said. When I came back to London I was determined to do a visual history--as far as possible, a truthful, visual history of what happened in the Soviet Union. I have been collecting ever since and obviously from a socialist perspective, i.e., not like Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest [Cold War/anti-communist historians]. And another thing--at that time in the late sixties, an enormous amount of stuff was being written on politics, including Trotsky's ideas, but people were not exactly reading it all. However, when my co-worker Francis [Wyndham] and I did the first pictorial Trotsky biography in 1972, 25,000 copies were sold. You saw people reading the book on the tube train, it was a big thing at the time, with a paperback edition by Penguin, one of Britain's main publishers. Our thinking then was to communicate something of Trotsky's ideas and so encourage people to read more about and from him. I asked King his opinion of the relevance of his work in light of the current campaign, accompanying the publication of the Blackbook of Communism, that equates Lenin and the gains of the Russian Revolution with Stalin and Stalinism. Well naturally I disagree with such a thesis. It is very difficult to do what I am doing at this period of time, but of course there was no political continuity between Lenin and Stalin. Stalin and his regime destroyed the revolution, he destroyed the hopes of communism. You only have to take a look at the pictures in room 3 of the exhibition. Featured there are the NKVD secret police photos of ordinary, completely innocent citizens who were taken away by Stalin's goons--men, women and children pulled out of their houses and shot. They didn't even go to the gulag. Are there any plans for further venues, or perhaps taking the exhibition to Moscow? Not at the moment. I know for a fact there would be great difficulties taking it to Moscow. Did you know they want to restore the monument of Felix Dzerzhinsky, which is the symbol for the power of the KGB apparatus? It used to stand directly before the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. The majority of Zyuganov's Communist Party deputies voted for the restoration of the statue. It's really frightening because in the chaos of the Soviet Union, these guys [the KGB] have been standing in the background. Now they say, "Our hands are clean, give us a chance to control things." It demonstrates perhaps that my exhibition isn't just a dry historical exercise. It raises and attempts to clarify questions which are of importance today. See Also: Exposing Stalin's "retouching": The Commissar Vanishes: The falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia, an exhibition based on documents from the Collection of David King--Berlin, Haus am Waldsee, Argentinische Allee 30 [29 December 1998] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1998 World Socialist Web Site All rights reserved ~~~~~~~~~~~~ WSWS : History Exposing Stalin's "retouching" The Commissar Vanishes: The falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia, an exhibition based on documents from the Collection of David King--Berlin, Haus am Waldsee, Argentinische Allee 30 By Stefan Steinberg 29 December 1998 Following successful stops in Vienna and Milan, David King's extraordinary exhibition on the history of Stalin's photographic falsifications is on display at the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin until 7 February. The exhibition in Berlin, The Commissar Vanishes, features much of the original material upon which King based his book of the same name (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1997). In the introduction to his book the author writes: "In Stalin's times there was so much manipulation of pictorial material that it is possible to reconstruct the history of the Soviet Union on the basis of retouched photographs." The politics of the October Revolution and the early years of the Soviet state stood in sharp opposition to the policies of the bureaucracy under Stalin. To the extent that the latter came to power as a parasitic caste based on the property relations established by October, it was necessary for Stalin to liquidate his opponents inside the Bolshevik party. King's exhibition reveals and records above all the ruthlessness and brutality with which the emerging bureaucracy secured its power. It was not enough that Stalin's victims were physically wiped off the face of the earth; it was also necessary to obliterate them from history and memory altogether. One of the first displays that one sees on entering the exhibition is a series of four photos/portraits. The first photo shows Stalin in the middle of a group of three leading members of the Communist Party (Antipov, Kirov and Schwernik) in 1926. For the pictorial history of the USSR printed in 1940, Antipov can no longer be seen. Nine years later in a pictorial biography of Stalin Schwernik has also disappeared. The last in the series of four exhibits is a painting of Stalin based on the original photo, but now Stalin stands alone. The crudity with which various "retouchings" were made gives the impression that those responsible sought to intimidate and horrify the viewer during the years of the terror. In some of the pictures faces have simply been cut out or pasted over. In other pictures, large groups of persons have been whittled away to leave one or two behind (see accompanying interview with David King discussing the Lenin/Gorky picture). In portraits and pictures Stalin's facial pockmarks vanish and instead the dictator is shown in warm pastel colours with his secret police henchmen surrounded by children and brightly coloured balloons. Naturally there was no place in Stalin's new order for Trotsky, the bureaucracy's number one enemy, who, together with Lenin, played the leading role in the October Revolution. This applied not only to photos and pictures featuring Trotsky in public life. Even casual snapshots came under the scissors of Stalin's police. The exhibition includes a photo of Trotsky and his wife in the backseat of a car during the former's convalescence in Georgia in the winter of 1924. In a reproduction of the photo from 1936 Trotsky and his wife have been obliterated by a figure who has been crudely superimposed. Authentic photos from the time of the revolution and of the Bolshevik leaders were extremely difficult to find after Stalin's terror began. This was due not merely to the gigantic apparatus devoted to falsification under Stalin. The threat of reprisal meant that many collectors and artists exercised a form of self-censorship. As King writes in the introduction to his book, in the 1930s those found in possession of a picture or reproduction of Trotsky could anticipate immediate arrest, imprisonment and probable execution. One of those who preferred to keep his "suspicious" material hidden was the celebrated Soviet artist Aleksandr Rodchenko. At the end of the 1980s King found a treasure trove of material in the attic of the long-dead painter. Amongst the material he found was the picture book Ten Years of Uzbekistan. In the book the faces of local party functionaries who were executed by Stalin in 1937 were simply blacked out. The result is a sort of gruesome, unintentional tribute to the fallen victims. Finally, in one room of the Haus am Waldsee King has made an attempt to set the record straight. He has filled all four walls with the police mug shots of a small number of the hundreds of thousands of nameless, innocent victims of Stalin's terror. Everyone genuinely interested in understanding Stalinism and its repercussions for the twentieth century should make an attempt to see this exhibition. Footnote: King's work indicates that the deliberate falsification of Soviet history did not end with Stalin. Following the dictator's death in 1953, and Khruschev's secret speech of 1956 outlining Stalin's crimes, the forgers in the Kremlin received fresh orders, i.e., the selective obliteration of Stalin from a number of important pictures and publications. He who lives by the razor dies by the razor! David King's book in English: The Commissar Vanishes: The falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1997. And in German: Stalin's Retuschen, Foto- und Kunstmanipulation in der Sowjetunion, Hamburger Edition, 1997. See Also: "There was no political continuity between Lenin and Stalin. Stalin and his regime destroyed the revolution": Interview with David King at the opening of his exhibition The Commissar Vanishes [29 December 1998] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright 1998 World Socialist Web Site All rights reserved ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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